Revive Your Slow-Growing YouTube Channel This Year
Many YouTube creators I’ve talked to told me they are looking to fix their YouTube channel’s slow growth this year. So in this blog, I want to share ways to revive your slow-growing YouTube channel without just pumping out more and more videos.
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VIDEO: Revive Your Slow-Growing YouTube Channel This Year
YouTube Channel Slow Growth
I know that for a lot of people, 2023 is the year they want to breathe new life into their YouTube channel to kind of revive it after a slow growth or stagnant state. And since it’s the beginning of the year, this is the perfect time to start thinking about that. So I want to share with you what I’m doing and what I’m helping my clients and students do to revive their slow-growing YouTube channel in 2023.
Now, what I’m about to share with you, I think it’s really meant for somebody who has a channel. It’s already up and running – you already have videos on it, you already have some viewers, and maybe you have subscribers of around a couple hundred to a couple thousand. This blog is going to matter to you.
As you know, I’m the founder of the Thriving Creators Society. Formerly, it was called something else, but it’s a new year and it has a new name. My membership group has been kind of the core of where I share what I’m working on and what’s been working well for me on YouTube and just in online business in general. With that, I keep seeing some of the same problems arise with members, especially when we have new members inside the Thriving Creators Society. Their channels are not growing quite as fast as they hoped that they would, and they think there’s something wrong with their topics, with their videos, with them, or with their niche.
Relying Too Much on SEO Tools
But more often than not, the real problem is that they’re using keyword research tools and relying solely on keyword research tools, like TubeBuddy, vidIQ, or Morningfame, to make decisions for them about what videos and what topics to create on their channel. Don’t get me wrong, keyword research tools are fantastic. I use them, I use all three of the ones that I just mentioned. Now, if you’ve been using these tools, and that works for you and your channel’s growing, you’re happy with it, then you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog, right?
Here’s the thing about relying solely on keyword tools to make these kinds of decisions: Those tools are taking all this data from outside of your channel. They’re just taking data that YouTube gives them, that Google gives them, all these outside sources give them. They’re using their own kind of programming and algorithms to make sense of it. Then, they present you with something they think might work for your channel. However, it’s not looking at the data inside your channel. That is where I like to think of it like a crystal ball.
The analytics inside of your channel, there are so many that tell you a lot about your videos. How do your videos perform, how are viewers consuming your content, how long are viewers consuming your content, how quickly after they hit play, are they leaving to watch something else? These are things that you can tweak and change and improve if you look inside your analytics to decide what videos to create next and what to do to improve those videos on your channel. That will help the videos you create have better results, more views, more watch time, higher click-through rates, and more engagement.
Pay Attention to Your Channel Analytics
Okay, hear me out on this. Let’s say you’re sick, you go to the doctor, and the doctor listens to your symptoms and says, “I know just how to heal you. I’ve analyzed these thousands of patients over here who have similar symptoms, and they look a lot like you, and they’re about the same size and the same gender as you. So I’m just going to take what I did to them, and we’ll treat you the same way without ever looking inside. Without ever doing bloodwork or blood sugar or blood pressure, any of those things that a doctor would do to treat you.”
You are just taking data from outside and applying it to you. That doesn’t really make much sense for your health and for the health of your YouTube channel. Now, I’m not saying don’t use those tools, I’m saying don’t rely solely on those tools. As you head into this new year, you know that you want to revive your slow-growing channel. A better way is to look at your channel analytics like a crystal ball and figure out what’s happening. What’s working, what needs to be improved, and what can you actually feasibly do to improve it this year?
Common Headaches of YouTube Creators
Typically, I see like three main sorts of headaches that I think all YouTube creators have. Whether you just started yesterday or you started ten years ago, we all have the same kind of headaches that we’re always kind of trying to solve.
1. Not Generating Enough Revenue
The first one is that your channel is not generating revenue or it’s not generating enough revenue. That’s a headache for content creators trying to do this as a business. If you have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time, and you’re in the YouTube Partner Program, you’re making money with ads. Even then, you probably are generating like $30 a month or something. That’s generally not enough to sustain the long-term YouTube channel business that you’re trying to build. You can generate revenue with other revenue streams of course, right? There is affiliate marketing. You could create courses, digital products, programs, and memberships, work one-on-one with people, and work with brands. There are many ways to leverage your content and time to generate revenue with your YouTube channel. Once you have them in place, that’s great.
2. Needing More Traction
Then, there’s the other headache, the second headache of needing to generate some more traction. Your channel is not growing as fast as you wanted it to. You’re not getting as many views or subscribers as you were hoping to be gaining by now. Most people say they’re going to use a keyword research tool, and they’re going to come up with some topics and SEO optimize those topics. If you follow the advice of almost every YouTube guru on Twitter, you’re going just to crank out more content. Make more and more videos. You’re not going to sleep; you’re not going to eat; you’re not going to spend time with your family. You’re going to just make more videos.
3. Lack of Time to Increase Output
That brings about the third headache and probably the biggest and most painful headache that we all have, which is when you don’t have time to 5x your output. As a content creator, you probably don’t have time to 5x or 10x your output. So we have these three headaches:
- My channel’s not generating enough revenue.
- My channel isn’t growing fast enough.
- I don’t have time to do anything about it.
So what do we do to solve these headaches? Well, I’m going to be diving deeper into these in the Revive and Thrive YouTube Challenge on my YouTube channel. You can check it out here. Don’t focus on any revenue streams that require your time, energy, and focus that is going to take away from creating content for your channel. As you know, if you want your channel to grow faster, you’re going to need to create content to do that. So don’t add more time in the revenue collection that’s going to take away from the time that you can put into the audience attraction, the traffic, the momentum, and the growth.
Conclusion
If you look really closely at your analytics of each video, you might even find that there are things you’re spending time on when you record and when you edit. Like fancy transitions and logo intro animations, for example, that are hindering the ability for viewers to stay interested in watching your content that can be eliminated from your video creation process entirely. Also, it will save you time and improve the results of your videos. There’s so much to look at.
The Revive and Thrive YouTube Challenge is generally geared towards someone who has maybe a couple of hundred YouTube subscribers to a couple thousand. For me, that’s the sweet spot for “I’m up and running. I know how to make videos. I know what I’m doing, I just want to make it happen faster.” So if that sounds like you, check it out here. Let me know what your biggest roadblock is to fixing your YouTube channel’s slow growth.
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